Anthony Peregrine spends three days following the Mediterranean coast from
Montpellier to Rome.

"All roads lead to Rome" is a blatant lie. Some of them lead to Blackburn. And those that do lead to Rome are not enjoyable. They take forever and, once you get into Italy, confirm that life is cheap and your life cheapest of all.

The plane is no better. From my home in France, the least expensive way to fly to Rome is via London. So the train is the reasonable option.

It is also desirable. You're going to Rome because this is the most civilised and sensual of capital cities. It makes sense to travel in a manner that sets the tone. And a rail trip round the Mediterranean surely cannot fail. Someone else will do the driving. You have no worries about the proper packaging for your toothpaste or falling out of the sky.

So you sit back and soak up suitable subjects preparatory for Rome. Classical culture expanded all round this coast. So did the Renaissance. And then there's the beauty of the Riviera, which gave rise to world tourism in the 1800s.

The prospect is inebriating. In practice, of course, reality kicks in with distractions. There are the imperatives of the timetable and delays. In handing yourself over to the rail network, you offload all responsibility for your short-term future. This is terrifically liberating – until it isn't, until you're becalmed in a field and the time of your connection at La Spezia is getting closer and there's not a damned thing you can do about it, and everything, up to and including your whole life, is about to go wrong. In Italian.

Then there are the other passengers. Among them, one – a muscular, scarred fellow sitting directly opposite – is, according to my wife, a serial killer. ("Serial killers never look like serial killers," I whisper. "This one does," she says.)

But that lies in the future. For the time being, we are waiting at Lunel station, near Montpellier. "I can barely contain myself," I tell my wife. "Do try," she replies, moving slightly further along the platform than seems necessary.

Day one

Lunel station, like all French stations, has the dignified bearing of a bastion of the Republic. "The train for Marseille?" I asked the chap in a cap. "Over there," he barked, pointing vaguely towards the rest of the world. He didn't lift his head from documents dealing with, I'd guess, plans to ensure public order in case of a points failure.

We are now standing with early-morning people going just down the line to work or school. One teenage schoolgirl is carrying two rats in a cage. Bring-your-own dissection classes? I long to ask but don't, either on the platform or in the train. Except in unusual circumstances, or unless a child shows off a drawing, people on trains don't speak to strangers.

We skirt the Camargue and the Etang de Berre and pull into Marseille's St Charles station. In the past, St Charles offered the traveller an opportunity to study a cross-section of France's disadvantaged in one tight-knit area. There were drunks, beggars, beggars' dogs, whores, drug addicts and happy madmen of many nations peeing in corners. These days, it's been redone with glass, metal and open-fronted fast-food outlets and is, thank heavens, indistinguishable from any other big modern station.

Time is tight. We have just enough minutes (19) to nip out onto the station's rather grand new terrace and survey France's oldest, most boisterous city. By this hour it is being outstared by a sun that renders it bleached and monumental, while casting shadows enough for skulduggery.

Now it is 12h59 and the real French Mediterranean train – to Nice – is pulling out of the station. It's a TGV, so we have numbered seats. Talk about contentment. Soon we're rolling along the coast, as the European elites did before us.

Tsar Alexander III was on the train into Nice shortly after the line opened in the 1860s. Napoleon III of France followed. So did King Leopold of Belgium and, later, our own Victoria. She travelled with an entourage of 60 and, so it is said, her own supplies of Irish stew.

We have ham sandwiches but the views are essentially the same. Rocks plunge straight to a sea spangled by light so clear that it has surely come direct from the Creation. Here and there, they grant bays and beaches. For mile after mile, this seascape remains powerful, elegant and immense. It enters through the eyes and gladdens the whole being. The journey is, in short, coming right.

Then it goes wrong. Somewhere around Toulon, the SNCF halts the train for an hour, then two. The carriage swells with mutterings and barking into mobile phones. The French demand perfection but anticipate anarchy, and are well-schooled in amplifying it. After two hours, nine minutes, the train starts moving, but backwards. "Perfect," the woman across the way screeches into a phone. "We're going backwards!" Then we stop again. ("We've stopped again!")

Wisely, no SNCF representative makes an appearance, for there is a sharp tang of Great Terror in the air. But then, on two hours, 23 minutes, we move forwards – and keep going. ("Here's a novelty – a train that's moving bloody forwards." She must be talking to her husband. Anyone else would have hung up ages ago.)

And the thing is that the relief is commensurate with the previous anguish. This is something that trains do well – both locking you up in the Black Hole of Despair, and then releasing you back to the sunlit uplands. It is included in the price of the ticket.

Chugging along, we flit through the lives of families on the beach as if flipping through holiday snaps. Then we're at Nice station and the sun goes out. The place is heaving with people. They are as disorientated as people always are in the grips of mass transport. The result is swirling frenzy and a hefty cuff to the back of my legs from a breakaway wheelie case.

For minutes, I hate everybody, but mostly the half-baked morons with pushchairs blocking the pavement. It's a long way from station to the Promenade-des-Anglais with a case and a limp. "We should have taken a taxi," says my wife. "We should have taken a tank," I cry, sweeping aside a mother and child. But then we burst out to the Bay of Angels. You have to be very grumpy indeed to keep grumpiness going here.

The bay opens like, well, like what I expect to see on passing through the Pearly Gates: vast acreage of sea and sky, mountains behind, palms before and a suggestion of frisky sophistication in the palaces fronting the prom.

Into one of which we are booked. It's a good one, too. The Palais de la Méditerranée has a fabulously ornate Art Deco-cum-classical façade soaring white above the seafront. It went to the brink of demolition late last century after a picaresque episode involving a disputed succession, a murdered heiress and a now-jailed Niçois ex-lawyer. Glamour rendered all the more alluring by undercurrents of scandal: that's Nice in a nutshell.

Up in our bedroom I unpack a bottle of Scotch. (After many muggings by minibar, I always take my own.) We settle on the balcony, overlooking the large terrace and pool directly below, the Promenade and sea just beyond.

Day two

A brilliant morning starts with a sprint to the flower market, a later bus ride up to the Cézanne museum. But that's it.

There is a train to catch. It is a friendly local item threading us towards Italy. Now, I mustn't bang on about the views or we will never get through, but there is a sense that, once you have arrived among these rocks, sea and sky, there's nowhere better to go. It's a sort of full stop to experience.

That's why so many rich people have ended up here. Their presence is not disruptive (though if you have been among big-spending Russians in a bar, you are entitled to disagree). Villas, gardens and generations of well-dressed, well-bred decadence enhance the natural lustre.

At Ventimiglia station, the lustre runs out. Though it's the entrance to Italy for thousands, the place has lost the will to live. Station buildings look shot at, the public lavatories are filthily squat, the sandwiches proto-historic and the staff filling in time between more important missions, conceivably for the UN.

The onward train is of a similar stripe – a much-battered symphony of light blues and lighter blues, of internal doors that don't shut and windows that don't open. And it has the serial killer sitting opposite us. He rolls an unlit Marlboro around his mouth in Dodge City fashion. On the window above his head is scratched the word "Amen" – the last gasp, my wife assumes, of a former victim, perhaps a clergyman.

It is not until the killer gets off, somewhere around Imperia, that I sit back and realise. Italy! The Italian Riviera! Then we enter a tunnel. That happens a lot in Liguria. The place is more tunnels than place. So Genoa comes as a relief and not solely because it's above ground. After hours, days, of elemental splendour, it's bracing to see the seaside grow suddenly productive and menacing.

The pandemonium of the great port stretches to the right, a gigantic tangle of cranes and waste land, of rusting metal, warehouses, containers and big boats promising much.

The resultant city swirls into our carriage – through Genoa, the train becomes the local tram service – and out again, in a flurry of shopping bags and high-octane conversation. Then we're free and, before we know it, the train expires in the middle of a field. As noted, our connection in La Spezia is now in terrible danger.

We make it with seconds to spare – and a dash of desperation, once overcome, is no bad thing. We enter the Tuscan plain in heightened spirits. The hills shimmer off to the left. The sea is mainly out of view to the right as we skirt the untended backs of Carrara and Viareggio.

Yes, that Carrara – where Michelangelo came for his marble before whacking it into David shape. Carrara's is also the marble of the Pantheon, Trajan's column and our own Marble Arch – and, glory be, here are masons' yards right by the track absolutely full of it. It's stacked up, or packed in crates, as if it were breeze blocks.

So to Pisa. We disembark, dump the bags and skitter across town to the Field of Miracles. We have never been before. I am pumped up to the max. The monuments apparently shut at 8pm. It's now around 7.25, which should allow enough time, if not to climb the Leaning Tower, then at least to scan the cathedral interior, and Pisano's pulpit, which is what I'm excited about.

I career into the ticket office. The guy is smiling. "We are closed," he says. "The ticket office closes at 7.30." By my watch, it is 7.28. By his, it is 7.31. His wins. "Return tomorrow morning."

We can't. We have a train to catch. I exit the office minded to kick someone. But, as my wife reminds me, we are among the greatest collection of medieval buildings in Italy. We should appreciate what we have. The tower, for a start. As advertised, it leans.

The campanile is also an item of considerable beauty. Across the way, the cathedral is more magnificent still. As very often before, I wonder how the Middle Ages – otherwise so brutal and disgusting – could have bequeathed majesty that still uplifts 900 years on. And then there are the Baptistry and the Campo Santo, and it's perhaps as well we couldn't get inside them, or I would be rabid. Plus which, it leaves a little extra money for aperitivi.

Day three

The excitement of arriving in the Italian capital is always tempered by the need to scramble through initial mayhem.

As we make it from mainline to metro station, it is as if, 1,600 years on, Alaric and his Visigoths have lately revisited Rome. Tunnels and stairways have evidently been recently sacked. They are long, scruffy, dark, threatening and set about with works, and signs doubling us back where we have just come from.

Finally, though, we are released into the light near the Spanish steps. We walk along the Via Condotti and, like notable English-speakers before us – Byron, Hemingway, Prince Philip – sheer off down a tiny street for the Hotel d'Inghilterra.

My wife smiles at the concierge and he smiles back. Though (or perhaps "because") owned by a university professor, the Inghilterra comes on like a gentleman's club run by contemporary Italian nobility.

The public anonymity of the rail service is replaced by the warmest possible concern for our welfare. Nothing is ruffled. This is one of many advantages of mixing with the moneyed.

For two full days, we have Rome before us. We are ready. Our aesthetic sensibilities are both battered and buffed. We start with a bottle of prosecco in the bedroom. £e_STnSFrom where to where? Lunel to Rome, via the Mediterranean coast.

The basics

How far? About 700 miles.

How long? Our three days could have been squashed into two, but that would have been stupid. A full week would be better, allowing decent stopovers in Marseille, Nice, La Spezia (for an offshoot railway jaunt to the Cinque Terre coastal villages) and Pisa.

How much? One-way fares from Marseille to Rome on this itinerary cost from £89.50 through Rail Europe (0844 848 4070; www.raileurope.co.uk). But, as we did, do it slowly and in style. Kirker Holidays (020 7593 1899; www.kirkerholidays.com) provides a five-star night in Nice, a four-star night in Pisa, and two five-star nights in Rome, all b & b, for £1,323pp. Included are return first-class rail travel from Marseille to Rome and transfers.

Time to read… For Marseille, Jean-Claude Izzo's thriller One Helluva Mess (Arcadia Books). For the Côte-d'Azur, The French Riviera: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I B Tauris) by Ted Jones.

Time to listen to… Your wife. Leave the iPod at home.

When to go Between April and October. Make sure you pack half what you intended to. You'll thank me for it.

Last Call for the Dining Car: The Telegraph Book of Great Railway Journeys (Aurum), Michael Kerr presents the pick of our archive. It is available from Telegraph Books (0844 871 1514; book.telegraph.co.uk) for £18.99 plus £1.25 p & p